The Media In 2014...From Predictions Made In 2004!

One of my favorite short films back in 2004 was one called "Epic 2014".  It was faux documentary that purported to report on the media scene in 2014.  It walks the viewer quickly through the history of the internet from Tim Berners-Lee up to 2004 (when the film was made) and then it begins to "report"/speculate about what the next ten years will hold.

If you haven't ever watched it or haven't watched it in awhile, take 8 minutes right now to take a look:



There is some silly stuff here (like Google-zon) and the video does not really hint at the rise of stuff like Facebook and Twitter (much less Instagram and Tinder...).

But the takeaway is an eerily prescient statement concerning the current state of the internet:

"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, [the internet] is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything available ever before.  But at its worst, and for too many,  [the internet] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But [the current state of the internet ] is what we wanted.  It is what we chose."

I don't know of anything that is quite this well done (or this insightful) about the future of the internet over the next 10 years (leave a comment if you do!) but I suspect that much of what we will be looking backwards at will involve new technologies like the one demonstrated in the 2 minute video below from Microsoft:



In case you are curious, the hardware and software capable of doing all this is coming to you next year.

New Gartner Hype Cycle Out; Some Interesting Changes From Last Year (Gartner.com)

Gartner provides, for my money, the most comprehensive and systematic coverage of technology trends among the commercial research providers.  One of their best free products is the annual Gartner Hype Cycle.

The Hype Cycle is a useful way of thinking about how typical technologies evolve and mature.  The 2011 version is displayed below (with a more complete report and video here):

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=1758314

I covered the Hype Cycle last year on SAM and comparing 2010's cycle with this year's is an interesting exercise.  In the first place, there are a number of technologies that are not on both cycles.  Gartner covers 1900 technologies so it is clearly impossible to put them all on a single Hype Cycle graphic.

Secondly, most of the technologies have not moved very much in the last year.  This makes some sense given that many of the technologies aren't expected to mature for "5 to 10 years" or "more than 10 years".

A couple of notable exceptions include augmented reality and the media tablet which have both crested the first big wave of expectations.  If Gartner is right, we should start seeing an increasing number of reports about the limitations of media tablets and the problems with augmented reality over the next 12 months.

I also always pay attention to what is coming in at the beginning of the Hype Cycle and what is about to leave the Hype Cycle.  There are some interesting new additions this year:  3D Bioprinting and quantum computing.  Location aware applications, speech recognition and (surprisingly) predictive analytics are all set to leave the stage -- they have become mainstream in Gartner's eyes.

ONI's New "Hoo-ahh!" Video, Deconstructing Analysis Techniques, The Geography Of Job Loss And The Future Of Shopping (Link List)

Lot's of interesting stuff crossing my desk this week:

• The Office of Naval Intelligence has a new promotional (i.e. "hoo-ahh) video out. It gives a brief overview of the ONI's new organizational structure and mission. Many people don't think about ONI as an intel career option but they actually do some pretty cool stuff. The video is certainly worth 5 minutes of your time (Note: It takes a few minutes to get started (I don't understand why these guys don't just upload these videos to YouTube...). Also, if you are interested, see it quickly as Matchbox Twenty's lawyers may slap a take-down notice on the ONI for unauthorized use of copyrighted material (not even a music credit, ONI? That was cold...).

• My favorite online design magazine, Johnny Holland, continues its excellent (if slow-motion) series of posts on deconstructing analysis techniques. The current entry focuses on transformation or "the act of taking a set of values from a dataset, processing them in some way (depending on the aims of the research) and arriving at a new set of values with the goal of revealing some aspect of the data from a new perspective." The entire series is very good and well worth the read.

• Visualizing information is a powerful way to communicate analysis. A good example of this is Tip Strategies infographic showing job loss and gain in the US from 2004-2009. It is both stunning and depressing but clearly shows the value of a good visual (Sorry, no embed. You will have to go to the site to see it).

• One of the trends I have been tracking now for a number of years is the growth and influence of virtual worlds and augmented reality. Cisco has recently produced an interesting video (via Kzero) that explores the future of shopping (you can see the video below). It sounds mundane but the underlying technical implications are pretty significant to intelligence and become doubly so when you realize that this world is just around the corner.

Imagine The Intelligence Issues In THIS Technical Environment... (Microsoft via KZero)

Microsoft has just released (and KZero has compiled) a series of videos that imagines a largely visual, computer augmented version of reality as the future of work (See below for the "montage" video from the series). This vision is an outgrowth of another concept, ubiquitous computing, that has been around for some time now.



Critical to the implementation of this vision are a few key technologies. 4G wireless is the most obvious one, in my mind. Without high speed wireless data pipes, none of this visual, interactive stuff gets off the ground. Don't get me wrong, its coming (WiMax and LTE look to be the most obvious candidates for bringing it to us), but it won't be everywhere overnight and it won't be cheap at first.

Another critical technology is batteries. Battery power improvements have not been able to keep up with improvements in processing power. Even if the batteries have the power, they also have to be light so they can work in the mobile devices in these videos.

The display technology is well on its way already. The clunky head-mounted display in the future of manufacturing video in this series are likely to soon be replaced by something like the Vuzix Wrap 920AV (coming out in the fall).

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>None of this technology is that far off, either. Likewise, the intelligence challenges inherent in even one of these technological changes are obviously immense. I have started to ask myself -- almost daily -- "What am I doing to prepare my students for this type of environment?"



(Side Note: I have been playing around with the new Wikipedia feature that allows you to create a "book" out of select Wikipedia articles. To demonstrate this capability, I have taken all of the Wikipedia articles referenced in this post and compiled them into a single "supplement" to this post. You can download this supplement from Wikipedia or directly in PDF format. You can even get the supplement printed, bound and sent to you. The function can work with any MediaWiki product. Very, very cool!)

More From The Rapidly Developing World Of Augmented Reality (Augmented Environments Lab via Serious Games)

I have written about augmented reality before but this new video from Georgia Tech's Augmented Environments Lab demonstrates a new level of ease of use and functionality. Using nothing but their software, Graz University's Studierstude Marker Trackers and an iPhone, the Yellow Jackets were able to create a well-integrated (with the real world), interactive AR application. Take a look at the video below:



The consequences of this technology to both teaching and intelligence as it becomes more well-developed and mainstream are simply staggering in my estimation.

Augmented Reality For Mobile Devices: It's Here... (Dante Technologies via Kzero)

Kzero featured a series of augmented reality videos today but the one that impressed me the most was the mobile application (see video below). I tracked down the maker of the product to a Singapore based company called Dante Technologies. While the site is not very sophisticated, the wide variety of augmented reality products and demo videos is pretty impressive.

Intelligence Professionals And Educators Take Note: You Have 5 Years Until "The Blur" Hits Everything

Take a close look at the new graphic from KZero below. I know it is hard to read (click on the image to get the full version) but the red dots represent existing virtual worlds and the blue dots represent planned virtual worlds. The size of the dot represents the number (in millions!) of inhabitants of these virtual worlds.

Notice anything special?


The fading line between the real and the virtual is already apparent to students going through colleges, universities and the entry level hiring pool right now. "The blur", however, hits us all in about 5-10 years when new students and new hires who were raised playing in virtual worlds begin to enter the workforce.

What is this "blur"? I borrowed it from Flint Dille. Flint is in the entertainment business (movies and games). He gave a speech some time ago to a bunch of young game designers where he outlined the concepts behind "the blur". You can find the whole presentation at his website, The Bureau Of Film And Games, but the point is that, within the entertainment industry, the traditional lines between the types of content (film, books, games, etc) have blurred to a point where they are no longer recognizable -- are not, perhaps, even particularly important.

High speed wireless telecommunications, an ever expanding sensor network to provide information and feedback and the expected advances in computing power will likely combine with this wave of virtual worlds natives to blur not just entertainment but everything. The educational and intelligence landscapes will not be immune; they will change completely in this augmented version of what we call reality.

One of the items at the recent OSINT Conference that drew a good bit of attention from the blogosphere was a briefing by Dr. Dwight Toavs from the NDU which included a scenario where terrorists used the popular online game World Of Warcraft to coordinate an attack. A large group of people who responded to this scenario thought it was silly; another large group of people over-reacted in the opposite direction. The point of a thought piece such as this, however, seems to me to be that this new kind of world is coming -- and sooner than we may be prepared for.

In a world that pilloried the intelligence community for failing to imagine the 9/11 plot, it seems prudent to spend some time and resources getting ahead of the blur.